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[Bates, Barrie]

(b Auckland, Jan 1, 1935).

New Zealand sculptor and conceptual artist. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1960s and first showed his work alongside that of fellow students such as David Hockney and Derek Boshier, helping to mark the emergence of British Pop art. The pseudonym that he adopted in 1962 reflected his obsession with different ways of representing fruit. On moving in 1964 to New York he began to produce neon versions of popular icons. In 1970 he established Apple as one of New York’s first artist-run ‘alternative’ art spaces.

The conceptual element in Apple’s early Pop work became dominant in the late 1960s and 1970s. From 1975 to 1980 he concentrated on the deconstruction of the ‘white cube’ gallery exhibition space, proposing alterations to or actually changing existing interiors, notably at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York (1977, 1978, 1980) and at a number of public galleries in New Zealand (...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born c. 1920; died 1985.

Sculptor.

Apuatimi, an Aborigine, sculpted figures using the basic traditional technique, whereby the defining features - in other words the eyes, nose, mouth and dress - are painted on and feathers or various other decorations added. The risk of this type of relic of primitive art in the context of a developed society is that the primitive arts are easily reduced to folkloric handicrafts....

(b San Biagio di Callalta, nr Treviso, May 19, 1939; d Melbourne, Aug 9, 1978).

Australian sculptor and draughtsman . After spending his childhood in Italy, he moved to Australia (1949). From 1958 to 1961 he was at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He travelled to London in 1962, where he studied printmaking at the Chelsea School of Arts. He then travelled to Milan and studied sculpture under Marino Marini at the Accademia di Belle Arti. After his return to Melbourne, he had his first one-man show of sculptures and etchings at the Argus Gallery in 1964. Many of his etchings of this period and later included circus characters and were inspired by the films of Ingmar Bergman and Luis Buñuel. Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), for example, has the violent distortion of the human figure characteristic of Baldessin’s series Stars and Sawdust and Stars and Sawdust II (1963; T. Baldessin priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., pl. 9). His early sculptures also had distorted and tormented figures, as in ...

Australian, 19th – 20th century, female.

Born in Tasmania.

Sculptor.

Dorothy Willis Barclay exhibited at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1910.

Australian, 19th – 20th century, female.

Sculptor.

Baskerville exhibited a statue entitled Young Girl Picking Flowers at the third annual exhibition of the Yarra Sculptors' Society in Melbourne (1910).

(b Bulawayo, 1959).

Zimbabwean sculptor. Bickle studied at Durban University and Rhodes University. She showed extensively in Zimbabwe in the 1980s and exhibited in India, Sweden and New Zealand in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Active in the arts in Bulawayo, she was a founding member of its Visual Artists’ Association. Her pieces are philosophical, both specifically in that she cites Foucault and Yourcenar, and generically in that they comment on the human condition: on hopes, dreams, conflicts and fantasies. Made of multiple manufactured and natural materials, her simple forms speak to complex situations, as seen in A Carta de Gaspar Veloso I, in which writings on parchment are used in conjunction with maps to evoke colonial histories. Her work is in both private and public collections in the US, Britain and Europe.

Australian, 20th century, male.

Painter, sculptor.

Boles received an artistic training thanks to a re-education project for former servicemen from the Commonwealth. He subsequently had the advantage of commissions for public collections. He spent a long period of time in Europe. He featured in the international exhibition of sculpture at the Musée Rodin in Paris in ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 1940.

Painter, sculptor, illustrator.

Peter Booth passed from Abstract-Minimal painting to a violent Expressionism in 1977, at which time he realised his first Figurative painting. His works frequently depict human misfortunes and torments, in chaotic compositions tinged with religious sentiments....

Australian, 19th – 20th century, male.

Sculptor.

Myril MacDougall Bowman exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries from 1925 to 1928.

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 1923, in Murrumbeena; died 26 April 1988, in Sandringham.

Sculptor (bronze). Figures, mythological figures, scenes with figures. Groups, statuettes, low reliefs.

Guy Martin à Beckett Boyd was the son of the potter William Merric Boyd and the brother of painters Arthur Merric Boyd and David Boyd. During World War II, he taught pottery to repatriated soldiers in New South Wales. After the war, he worked as a commercial potter before becoming an established sculptor. He created bronze castings of figures, often in attitudes of movement. Boyd was also an active environmentalist....

(b Sydney, Aug 8, 1919; d Sydney, April 19, 2005).

Australian sculptor, video, installation artist, and sound artist. Brassil received her initial art training at Sydney Teachers College, East Sydney Technical College, and Newcastle Technical College (1937–9). She taught art for 20 years at Campbelltown High School before commencing her exhibiting career in the early 1970s.

Brassil’s first recorded work is Trilogy: Twentieth Century Perception (1969–74; Sydney, U. W. Sydney). Trilogy is composed of three components: Sound Beyond Hearing (900×900×150 mm), Light Beyond Seeing (900×600×150 mm) and Memory Beyond Recall (1050×1050×150 mm). Unlike Brassil’s later works, these three components can be wall mounted. They are beautiful, highly finished, shallow black boxes, and two out of the three are electronic. Memory Beyond Recall has glowing lights veiled behind layers of paper that appear and then dim down and disappear. Light Beyond Seeing has a central lit portion that uses mirrors to suggest an infinitely deep space. The main themes of Brassil’s career—perception, sound, memory, and the transcendental realm—are all signalled in this early work....

[Michael] (Gordon Challis)

(b Sydney, May 8, 1938).

Australian painter and sculptor. He studied art at the East Sydney Technical College (1956–8) but left dissatisfied before completing the course. An important stage in his development was his discovery in 1959 of Australian Aboriginal art and the art of Melanesia and Polynesia, which he saw in New Zealand and on a visit to New Guinea in 1960 while working with the Australian Commonwealth Film Unit. In 1961–2 he lived in the Sydney suburb of Annandale with fellow artist Ross Crothall (b 1934) producing the first of his significant work. With Colin Lanceley the artists held two influential exhibitions in 1962 of painting, collages and assemblage, in Melbourne at the Museum of Modern Art and Design and in Sydney at the Rudy Komon Art Gallery, using the name Annandale Imitation Realists. They exploited discarded materials and disdained finish in a raw and irreverent art that mixed painting and sculpture, often collaborating on work. Imitation Realism was the first full expression of ...

New Zealander, 20th century, female.

Born 30 April 1890, in Wellington.

Painter, sculptor. Landscapes, flowers. Busts.

Margaret Butler exhibited in Paris from 1927 at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts and the Salon des Tuileries.

As well as her busts, Butler is known for a ...

Australian, 20th century, female.

Active in England 1926-1930.

Born 25 April 1892, in Bendigo; died 23 December 1964, in Cowes.

Sculptor.

Ola Cohn studied drawing in 1904 then modelling from 1910 to 1919 at the Bendigo School of Mines. She resumed her studies under sculptor John Robertson Tranthim-Fryer at Swinburne Technical College ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Active in England from 1935, and in Italy from 1958.

Born 1897, in Woodend, Victoria; died 1987, near Bordighera, Italy.

Painter, sculptor. Portraits, landscapes.

Colin Colahan studied under the tonalist painter Max Meldrum in Melbourne from 1916 to 1919, and continued his training in London and Paris. He exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Français ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 1942, in Warrnambool (Victoria).

Painter, printmaker, sculptor.

Tony Coleing studied at the National School of Art in Sydney and continued his training in England. In 1964, he travelled in Europe and exhibited in London. In 1968, back in Sydney, he began exhibiting his colourful sculptures regularly....

(b Melbourne, Oct 4, 1913; d Melbourne, July 5, 1986).

Australian painter, printmaker, draughtsman, sculptor, cartoonist and illustrator. Largely self-taught, he began printmaking in 1931 and worked as a caricaturist, cartoonist and illustrator for the weekly and left-wing press, his outlook influenced by experience on the dole and political struggle during the Depression. In 1941 he began oil painting, his first pictures being mainly a celebration of Australian working-class tenacity during the 1930s: for example At the Start of the March (1944; Sydney, A.G. NSW). A founder-member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938, he initiated its 1942 anti-Fascist exhibition and helped organize an Artists’ Unity Congress, receiving awards for his paintings of miners in the ensuing Australia at War exhibition in 1945. From 1939 to 1940 he was in New Zealand and from 1949 to 1952 in Europe, mostly London. Later he made frequent trips to Britain and France, as well as visiting the USSR and Mexico.

Counihan’s imaginative and creative versatility enabled him to produce extended pictorial metaphors for inherent contemporary crises, embodying potent artistic responses to specific conditions of oppression and discrimination, the nuclear threat and attendant social alienation. From the late 1960s he created images in numerous interrelated series challenging Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, for example ...

British, 19th – 20th century, male.

Active in Florence, Sydney and London.

Of Australian origin.

Sculptor.

(William Archibald)

(b Melbourne, Australia, May 1, 1914; d London, Dec 16, 1983).

English architect and sculptor. He studied at the University of Oxford (1932–5) and the Architectural Association, London (1935–40), and then served with the Royal Engineers in West Africa and Asia. In 1948 he set up in practice in London with Fello Atkinson (1919–82), Dick Maitland (1918–69) and Stefan Buzas (b 1913). From the outset Cubitt drew on his acquired knowledge of tropical countries, designing several schools and colleges in Ghana between 1951 and 1954. The practice rapidly gained a pioneering reputation in this field and, after designing some schools in Sowerby Bridge and Pontefract, Yorkshire (1954–7), it was appointed to plan the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, a project that was not completed until 1971. Other work in the 1950s and 1960s included a factory in Rangoon, office buildings in Sierra Leone and Nigeria and the Faculty of Medicine and Teaching Hospital (...

[William] (Franklin)

(b Port Chalmers, Jan 23, 1935).

New Zealand photographer, sculptor, installation artist, and painter, active also in France and Great Britain. Culbert consistently explored the workings of both natural and artificial light in his works, as well as the transformation of found objects and materials. A student at Hutt Valley High School, his artistic ability was fostered by the radical art educator James Coe. From 1953 to 1956, Culbert studied at the Canterbury University College School of Art in Christchurch. Moving to London in 1957 to attend the Royal College of Art, he became interested in the photographic works of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, while his paintings were informed by Cubism. In 1961 Culbert moved to Croagnes in Provence, France; he remained in France and the UK for the rest of his career.

During 1967–8, Culbert shifted his focus from the analysis of form and light in painting to the analysis of actual light, often arranging light bulbs in grid formations. In ...